Taking Your Happiness To The Next Level - Decrease Interruptions

Make Time For Happiness - Series: Part 2

Last episode I talked about adding that missing ingredient to your daily to-do list. The emails and instant messages I received were overwhelmingly positive and ranged from, “wow what a good idea” to, “I can’t believe that I had forgotten how to make time for happiness.” If you missed my last post, read it now, I’ll wait.

Adding Happiness To Your To-Do List

Now that you know how to add important items to your to-do list, it’s time to learn what you should remove from your list. Guess what? What you need to remove I bet isn’t even on your list. To take your happiness to the next level you must decrease interruptions.

Getting Rid Of Interruptions

Interruptions are robbing you of your most important assets, your mind, your time, and your happiness. It’s time to reclaim your time, push your mind to it’s fullest potential, and enjoy greater amounts of happiness. Let’s go.

In Rich Schefren’s newest report The Attention Age Doctrine he says:

With information no longer scarce, and an ever increasing number of new technologies being developed to continually interrupt us, and to many choices to consider with almost everything, the resource that has become most scarce is human attention.

Today’s constant barrage of interruptions are robbing you of the ability to focus your attention on the task at hand.

• Phone Calls
• Email
• IM
• TV
• Radio
• Video Games
• Kids

Here is an example of what I mean.

It took me 4 hours to write the first part of this series. When I had finished writing I reread what I wrote and realized it should have only taken me 20-30 minutes to finish that article. Why did it take 4 hours to do 20-30 minutes of work? Simple, the interruptions never stopped.

My phone rang four times in those 4 hours. I checked my email and responded to it twice. 3 people were instant messaging me. The TV was on and I found myself glancing up at it every few minutes even though I really was not watching the show that was on. And finally my kids were playing video games and running around the house making lots of noise while trying to get my attention. If you want to be more productive, have time to do things that make you happy, spend less time sitting in front of a computer screen, and spend more quality time with my family and friends, then it is imperative that you identify distractions and decrease interruptions.

Focus Your Attention

One of the secrets of really successful people is their ability to focus like a hawk on the task at hand. This ability is not something they were born with but a skill that they perfected over time. You can learn to focus your attention also, it just takes determination and planning.

Let’s say your goal is to write a great post for your website. Now that you have your goal, examine what will be necessary for you to achieve your goal.

1. Decide on a topic for your killer post.
2. Determine the benefit you want to deliver to someone that reads the post.
3. Write a knockout headline that tells the reader the benefit they will receive from reading the post.
4. Research your topic. (do not over research a topic, your focus is on writing a great post not getting a Ph.D.)
5. Write your must read post.
6. Deliver the benefit you promised the reader.
7. Proofread and correct bad grammar and spelling mistakes.
8. Publish your phenomenal post.

Notice what is missing from that list? No interruptions! Don’t answer the phone, don’t check your emails or respond to them, don’t instant message anyone, turn off the TV, turn off the radio, don’t even think of playing solitaire or WoW (who plays WoW anyway, ;)), find something for the kids to do and tell them you will be busy for a while and that they are not to disturb you unless something is on fire or someone is bleeding. Now focus all of your attention on your goal during the time you have set aside for the completion of your goal.

By decreasing interruptions you can focus your attention on really productive tasks, use your mind to the best of it’s abilities, produce better work, and spend more time doing things that make your family, your friends, and you happy. The world will not end if you don’t answer your email 10 times a day.

Make Time For Happiness - Series:

• Part 1 - Adding Happiness To Your To-Do List
• Part 2 - Taking Your Happiness To The Next Level - Decrease Interruptions
• Part 3 - Don’t Be Stingy! - Give Some Happiness To Increase Your Happiness
• Part 4 - How To Start Pursuing Your Happiness Today

I want to hear from you! What are your biggest distractions?